After attending the Your Party conference in Liverpool this weekend, Robert Carter says it is squandering its potential through internal chaos and hostility towards religious Muslims, forcing the Muslim community to prioritise its own independent political organisation rather than wait for the party to mature.
Compare and contrast the Reform UK and Your Party conferences this year – the comparison is almost painful.
Reform UK has built a disciplined political engine to spread its message of hate and division: sharp messaging, tight organisation, confident leadership, and a grasp of public mood that feels almost surgical. Their events run like clockwork — slick, energised, and emotionally tuned to a country that feels tired, betrayed and hungry for change.
Your Party, on the other hand, feels like a movement that hasn’t yet learned how to stand on its own feet. The ideological infighting is relentless. Co-founder Zarah Sultana boycotted Day 1 of her own conference. Factions wage battles more suited to student politics than national politics.
What should have been a hopeful new force on the left has instead become a cautionary tale about what happens when passion isn’t matched with competence.
Your Party is alienating Muslims at the worst possible time
When Your Party was announced a few months ago, many Muslims saw in it a possible political home. A left-wing, anti-war, anti-imperialist project should have naturally aligned with the concerns of a community still reeling from Labour’s betrayal over Gaza. Instead, Your Party managed to turn excitement into disappointment at record speed.
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The internal hostility towards socially conservative Muslims — subtle in some places, blatant in others — has driven many away. Rather than welcoming religious Muslims and incorporating their values into a broad, inclusive coalition, sections of the party treat them with suspicion, discomfort or outright ideological disdain. Instead of building bridges, Your Party is burning them.
This is a catastrophic strategic mistake. No credible political movement of the left should willingly alienate one of the most mobilised and politically-awakened communities in the country. At a moment when Muslims are asserting their political power like never before, Your Party is signalling — intentionally or not — that our values are unwelcome.
Your Party must make a choice
Your Party must decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be a serious national movement capable of building alliances, winning seats and shaping the country? Or does it want to remain a chaotic echo chamber where internal ideological purity matters more than electoral reality?
Right now, Your Party appears to be choosing the latter. It is sacrificing broad community support in order to satisfy a small but very loud ideological faction. And in doing so, it is throwing away the biggest natural ally it could have had: Britain’s Muslims.
If Your Party truly wants to matter, it must stop allowing internal culture wars to dictate its direction. It must respect religious Muslims as legitimate partners, not obstacles. It must prioritise political maturity over virtue signalling. Until it does this, it will remain a curiosity— something to laugh at, not something to vote for.
Muslims have no time to waste
Whatever happens to Your Party, the Muslim community cannot simply sit back and hope it sorts itself out. The last general election proved that Muslims have real electoral power. Five independent, pro-Gaza MPs were elected. Several more came extremely close. Vote splitting held us back, but the trajectory is clear: the community is learning, organising and waking up politically.
We must continue that work. We must be strategic in choosing where and when to run independent candidates not beholden to a party line. We must ensure those candidates are capable, disciplined and genuinely rooted in their communities. And we must build political institutions that do not depend on the goodwill of any party — left or right.
Your Party could still grow, mature and offer a genuine alternative on the left. But that requires hard choices: real leadership, real discipline, and a willingness to respect Muslim voters rather than treat them as inconvenient. If the party refuses to do this, it will fade into irrelevance long before it has a chance to rise.
But the Muslim community cannot hinge its political future on the hope that others will act wisely. We must take control of our own direction. Britain’s political landscape is shifting rapidly, and only those who organise will have influence in what comes next.
Your Party may find its way one day. But we cannot afford to wait for it.
